Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Mailchimp for a lot of our email communications internally and with clients - newsletters, marketing, birthday messages, updates, announcements, and everything in between. Probably the best use of it has been to convey information about various program updates as well as put out information to our network that would otherwise take a while to put together.

Pros and Cons

Easy Builder
Automatic adaption to different screens
Merge Tags

Certain functions (tables) being HTML
Slight learning curve in the lingo/jargon they use
Constraints of the builder (understandable, but sometimes frustrating)

Return on Investment

Saved time on email communications and marketing efforts

Alternatives Considered

I haven't found anything quite like Mailchimp to compare it to. Overall, Mailchimp works well for email marketing, has many capabilities, has a slight learning curve, but does what it's supposed to do well.

Usability

As I've mentioned, it's pretty easy to grasp the basics once you understand Mailchimp's lingo. What is harder to do is understand the full scope of functionality without doing the research or being able to code. There are actually many Mailchimp capabilities I will not have a full grasp of because I am not familiar with HTML. Tutorials and different web tools can help, but to be fully effective, you need to know HTML.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

We haven't utilized Mailchimp for much outside of the email marketing functions. From what I've seen, it creates some decent landing pages, but I can't really say for the other marketing functions.

Lessons for Success

The best thing that Mailchimp does for us is simplified email marketing efforts. It does save time and helps us organize and track the communications that we are giving clients and personnel. It removes a lot of the headache that comes from sending emails to devices with multiple screen sizes, as well as helps us test our mailing lists.

Key Insights

Do you think Mailchimp delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Mailchimp's feature set?

Yes

Did Mailchimp live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Mailchimp go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Mailchimp again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

I like Mailchimp overall. It does email marketing well, it's relatively simple to use for someone who has no coding experience. I like that if you do have the experience, Mailchimp has the ability to be a lot more customizable. That said, I would not recommend it to someone who is either not tech savvy, or has a hard time grasping how the system works. It's not intuitive to the point where you can hand it off to anyone and trust things will be done correctly. There is some training and coaching involved, and even after a couple of years there are many things Mailchimp can do that I've never realized until I had to YouTube a tutorial for something very specific I needed, only to discover it was a hidden function the whole time.

Great (Email) Marketing Platform

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp